Looking back over old awards can be fascinating. The best new play of 1983 as voted for by the London critics was David Edgar's Maydays. Ever seen it? Unless you were around in 1983, it's unlikely. Edgar's epic drama spanning 1956 to the 1980s and people's drift to the right was very much a play of its time, a reaction against the then Thatcher government and the loss of 1960s ideals.

The year before, the best play award was shared by Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska and Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Both can currently be seen on British stages: the Pinter in Bristol, and the Stoppard in Leeds. The runners-up, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Michael Frayn's Noises Off, have either recently been seen in the West End or are on right now.

The fact that so many plays from 30 years ago are still regularly revived is interesting in itself (and it does sometimes feel as though young directors spend too much time in the British Library looking to unearth a lost gem), but it raises an intriguing question – why it is that some plays seem like plays for all time, and some only of their time?

Of course, playwrights and plays go in and out of fashion. Terence Rattigan, Arnold Wesker and Edward Bond are recent examples of writers who appeared to have had their day, but whose plays are suddenly everywhere. Despite the upcoming The Doctor's Dilemma at the National, Bernard Shaw is far less popular than back in the 1970s and 80s; and almost nobody except amateur groups now does Jean Anouilh – and I can't say I'm distressed by the lack of opportunity to see The Lark, and Ring Around the Moon.

Some plays that were stellar in their day do date very quickly. Of all John Osborne's plays, his most famous, Look Back in Anger, is the one that looks most like a museum piece. Yet Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler often still seem startlingly modern more than 100 years on.

Maydays may not have been a great play or a lasting one, but perhaps it was the right play for the right time. Sometimes the success of a play – and of its revival – is all in the timing. Manfred Karge's 1986 Conquest of the South Pole, showing at the Arcola, and Barrie Keefe's 1977 Barbarians, at Tooting Arts Club, may have looked a little dusty if they had been revived five or six years ago, but suddenly seem searingly topical in a time of rising youth unemployment. Churchill's 1987 Serious Money was very much of its time but suddenly looked slap up-to-date when the credit crunch hit.

I recently saw CP Taylor's Good, dating from 1981, about the rise of the Nazis and a good man gone bad. Although it represents that year in the National Theatre's One Hundred Plays of the Century, I was struck by how clumsy and declamatory it seemed and wondered whether it was Alan Howard's apparently dazzling performance, rather than the play itself, that had caught the critics' eye on its premiere. Likewise, it may be that it was Paul Scofield's acting in A Man For All Seasons rather than the play itself that carried the day for Robert Bolt's drama of conscience, another unlikely entrant on the NT's 100 list.

Or maybe it's just that back in 1981 when the Royal Shakespeare Company staged Good, a still substantial part of the play's audience would have lived through the war and therefore would have felt a direct connection with it, and that ideas about the banality of evil simply weren't as widespread as they are now. I was quite pleased to see that in the 1981 critics' awards, Good was pipped at the post by Brian Friel's Translations – a play that, despite its very specific Irish setting, is very definitely a play for all time and all places.